Shoreleave
by august
Summary: Janeway goes missing.


by august  
cSept 99  
  


Story Notes: This is dark. Darker than I've written for a while, so please...you have been warned. Nothing particularly obscene or explicit, just a nice dose of reality. Parents, watch your children...policing them is not my responsibility. 

Disclaimers: As always, Paramount owns it all. I am a mere peasant, stealing sheep from the flock. Lyrics used from 'Reasons To Be Beautiful' by the exquisite Hole. No copyright infringement is meant, just mere adoration of their words. 

* * * indicates a shift in point of view and time.   
  
  
  
  
_And I weep at your feet  
And it rains and rains....  
_

  
  
I blame myself. When she didn't come back after her allocated time I was actually happy. I thought she had forgotten the time. I thought, perhaps, that she was enjoying herself. 

When she didn't show up for the dinner shift at the messhall, I noticed. It didn't set off warning sirens though, I just assumed that she was eating planetside, or that something had come up. If I had indulged my desire to find out where she was every time I thought of her, I would never get any work done. 

To tell you the truth, I didn't even think about her that night. There used to be a time when I would have checked in with her by comm, or thought up an elaborate excuse to stop by her quarters. But that night I shot some pool, had a few drinks with Lomanski and went to my quarters.   
  


My comm badge went off at three that morning. I ignored the first two buzzes, I always do. Then I stretched my arm out and banged down on it. 

"Chakotay." I said groggily, sitting up. 

"Commander, I apologise for waking you, but there is a matter of some emergency. The Captain has not returned from her shore leave." 

"Tuvok?" 

"It has been over fourteen hours, Commander. The Captain has not returned." 

I sat up straight. I was awake.   
  


"Have you sent a party down to look for her yet?" 

"Two." I smiled a little at his answer. The standard action would have been one, but the old man was fond of Kathryn. 

"I take it they found nothing?" I asked, pulling on my pants and searching for my boots. 

There was a moments silence, and I imagined his silent mutterings about the human nature of stating the obvious. "There is no sign of her, Commander." 

"Well, I'll be right there. Meanwhile, wake Seven and B'Elanna - let's see if there is some way of getting our scanners to work in this environment." 

"Understood."   
  


When I got up to the bridge, things were swarming. Tuvok was organising ground teams and ordering Seven and B'Elanna. Harry was fiddling around with the sensors, trying to configure a beam that would break through the atmosphere of the planet and allow us to scan. Tom was talking about taking the Delta Flyer down to do a basic search. 

I was still trying to compute it in my head. Kathryn was gone. Kathryn was gone. 

I'll make no pretense of the fact that things between us had been strange. After the Borg and Seven and Kashyk... well I began to realise that perhaps I didn't know her at all. But I had never, ever imagined life without her. That she would one day beam down to a planet, and I would never see her again. 

But that's how it happened. That's how the great Captain Janeway of the Federation Starship Voyager went missing. No great battle, no intense hostage negotiations. She simply beamed down one day, and never came back. 

The first few days of the search were frantic. We had already been in contact with the government of the planet -- and the help that they had given us in those first few days was incalculable. Rotating away teams from our ship had combined with their regular patrols swept the surface of the planet. Never before had malfunctioning technology been as infuriating as it had then. Knowing that, if not for the atmosphere of this planet, we could have picked up her bio-signs in a second was an immeasurably frustrating thing. 

We stayed in orbit around that planet for two months. For two months the entire crew focused their attention on Getting Our Captain Back. For two months, the command crew lived with the illusion that we were looking for someone who wanted to be found. 

No one dared to voice it in the first few weeks. And, maybe, no one even thought it in the first few weeks. It was B'Elanna, in all her wisdom and grace, who finally verbalised the thought in the middle of a briefing. 

"What if we're going about this the wrong way?" She had said, staring straight down at the table. 

"How's that?" Tom turned to look at her. 

"Maybe we should be searching for someone who doesn't want to be found." She said, plainly. 

In all of our conflicts and horrors, I don't think that there has been a sentence uttered with such a devastating effect. Not the Kazon, not the Borg - hell, nothing in this godforsaken quadrant had so obviously wounded them all as B'Elanna's statement. 

"No." Neelix said immediately. "No, that's impossible. Not the Captain! No, B'Elanna. No." 

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at me. "Maybe not. Hell, I hope I'm wrong - but Chakotay, you asked for a new approach and I'm telling you what I think." 

I looked around the room. I knew she was right. We all did. 

Harry surprised me the most. Out of all the people to be indignant, I had assumed he would be first. I keep forgetting that after five years and a hell of a lot more than most people could handle, Harry is not the reality virgin I first met. He spoke quickly. "B'Elanna's right. And this would be the perfect planet for her to leave. We can't scan down there -- anywhere else and we could pick up the human lifesign straight away. If she was going to go..." 

"...what better place than this." I absently finished off his sentence. 

The room was quiet.   
  


"She was not happy here." Seven said, finally. 

"She wouldn't leave." Neelix countered. 

"She hasn't been the same since the void, Neelix. You, of all people, know that." B'Elanna threw back at him. 

"I agree with Neelix, the Captain would never abandon the ship B'Elanna." Tom interrupted. "Christ, how many times has she tried to go down with Voyager? She would never leave. Never." 

"But it appears that she has, Ensign." Tuvok spoke, leaning forward. 

Everyone turned to look at Tuvok.   
  


Things changed after that meeting. The crew changed. On any given day I could walk into the messhall and hear the conspiracy theorists. 

"It makes perfect sense that she would wait until we were on a planet where we couldn't scan for her." 

"I hear that she had been planning to leave for months." 

"I hear that she made a deal with the Borg. They took her so that we get clear passage from Deltan space." 

"She's still on board, she just went crazy. The doctor put her in stasis."   
  


And so our search continued, just changed a little. We sent our informants to try and infiltrate the underground. To try and see where a person who was hiding would go. Every day we went searching, I became more and more convinced that she had just left the ship. We met with more politicians, more Admirals and military tacticalists. They informed us that while there was political unrest, it was minimal and insular. It was not their way to involve outsiders, and anyway no demands had been made. We made the usual inquiries, and then more so. Nothing came of it. 

Every day we searched was another day we realised that she was not being found because she did not want to be. 

And yet still we looked.   
  


I think, in hindsight, that I would have been quite willing to stay in that planet's orbit forever. I knew things were drawing to a close, however, when after two long sleepless months, I was summoned into the Ambassador's office. She was a kind woman - intelligent and diplomatic. She welcomed me into her office with the same warmth that she had on the many occasions we had co-ordinated the search together. 

"I take it, Commander, that you have progressed no further in your search?" 

"No, we haven't." 

She poured a long drink, and handed it to me. "You understand that we have tried to help you as much as we can." 

"Of course, Ambassador. Your help has been invaluable. I wish there was some way we could-" 

"-Nonsense, speak nothing of it." She picked up her glass and sipped from it. I was waiting for the bomb she was about to drop on me. "I'm afraid, Commander, that my government has decided to call back our groundsmen. Our advisors have suggested that the tactical probability of finding your Captain is minimal." 

"I understand." I said, quietly. 

"Yes, I suspect you do. You have a long journey ahead of you, Commander." 

"Yes." 

"And you are not getting any closer by staying here, searching the same grounds." 

"Are you asking us to leave, Ambassador?" 

"If it makes it easier for you to go, then yes." 

I nodded, knowing the words were coming but not wanting to hear them, all the same. "I thank you once again for your hospitality." 

I stood and placed my glass on the table. I had no right to be angry with this woman, with this government and yet I was. Part of me didn't want to stop looking until I found ... something. Most of me, however, knew that we would have to leave. 

"Chakotay?" She called out as I walked to the door. I turned, and waited for her to speak. "I wish I had had a chance to meet your Captain. She must have been an amazing woman for your crew to spend so much time searching for her." 

I smiled, a little. "Yes, I used to think so too."   
  


And so it happened that two months and six days after Kathryn Janeway beamed down to the upper Quarter of Sion, Voyager left orbit without her. 

  
* * *   
  
  
In graduate command school, we were taught hostage mentality. Although it doesn't make good practise for Captains to indulge too much in the what ifs of capture, it's a realisation we are imbued with as soon as we take command. 

They will always take the Captain. 

I didn't see them coming, I didn't hear it. I was in the markets, looking for a present for Neelix. It was his birthday the next week. I felt a blow to my left shoulder, I screamed as the bones broke. I tried to stand up as they dragged me. Stones cut my back. Someone kicked me in the head and then I think I blacked out. 

For the first few days (?) in the cell, they stopped to talk with me. A curt, clipped language that I couldn't understand. It frustrated them, I think, and they stopped coming. I tried to explain to them that the communicator they had taken from me was what made my language comprehensible. Of course they didn't understand. They started looking at me like luggage that they didn't know what to do with. And then they shut off the lights and just stopped coming. The food started coming through a hole in the wall. It would drop in the darkness and I would have to crawl on my hands and knees, feeling the floor to find it. 

It was bland and tasteless. I ate it all. 

I waited for Voyager. In those early days, I waited for Voyager, for the miraculous rescue. I did the exercises I was taught, designed specially for capture situations. My shoulder was broken, I was sure of it and I winced with pain each time I moved. I meditated and I thought of them all. The isolation was worse than any torture I had known. 

And now the food has stopped coming. I don't know how long ago. A day, maybe two. I think of the replicators on Voyager, how good it will be to chose anything I want. To taste everything I can. 

There is no light in this room, yet I have began to notice that it is not black. I wish it were completely black - a blanketing darkness that doesn't keep reminding me that there is such a thing as light. I remember a time when we freed some POWs from a Cardassian camp. They had been kept in the dark for so long that it hurt their eyes to see the sunlight. They cried because they hadn't seen it, and then because it hurt to see it. And for many other reasons, I suppose. 

I am so hungry and thirsty. My thoughts fly around, out of control. I think I am probably delirious. I do not want to die here, in this room. Why have they left me here to die? 

  
* * *   
  
  
It's been three years now since she went missing. The ship has settled into a routine. Everytime we enter a new planetary system, Harry sends an all frequencies sub-space message. Tuvok meets every delegation and amongst the first thing he inquires about is the Captain. B'Elanna and Seven have been working on a modified DNA scan. I don't think that any of us believe that we will ever find her. 

I'm not sure any of us believe that she wants to be found. 

I occasionally - very occasionally, wonder is something did happen to her. If she was killed, or kidnapped or... but then reality comes flooding back and I remember that there was no body and no motive and no demands and ... 

So we all do our things to survive. And me? What habit have I cultivated along the way? Every time we dock in a new space-port, I find myself scanning the crowd. I'm not sure what for -- her, maybe. I don't really believe I will find her; I'm sure she wouldn't be foolish enough to stay on a planet where I could find her. 

And I'm not sure I would know her, even if I did. 

  



End file.
